SwiftKey's latest keyboard is powered by a neural network

A new SwiftKey keyboard hopes to serve you better typing suggestions by utilizing a miniaturized neural network. SwiftKey Neural does away with the company's tried-and-tested prediction engine in favor of a method that mimics the way the brain processes information. It's a model that's typically deployed on a grand scale for things like spam and phishing prevention in Gmail or image recognition, but very recent advancements have seen neural networks creep into phones through Google Translate, which uses one for offline text recognition. According to SwiftKey, this is the first time it's been used on a phone keyboard. To grasp how the new system works, we need to understand the old one.